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How Politics and Religion Demonize Each Other

Religion is not as old as the human life span on earth. Yet it has been successful in captivating the belief systems of billions of people and in creating a delusional ideology- that only the set of beliefs followed by oneself is superior over the rest- among most of the believers, if not all. We would be faced with a bitter truth, if we investigate whether the sanctity of our faiths has remained intact or has eroded in its due course of time- may be a couple of millenniums- throughout which we and our ancestors have believed in our consanguineous traditions of religions; our generations will continue to entrust their lineages with a similar kind of wavering unstable faith for the years to come. While trotting out the clout of our faith to establish supremacy over the others, we no longer remain faithful to the very fabric of what defines us in terms of our farthermost belief.

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What has led us to this unfortunate climax where there is no mutual sense of belief and compassion between the fellow members of the species, is a contrived, counterproductive ideology that goes against the very essence of our faith. Is it the antics played on us by the intelligent design to give time its leeway to move ahead and bring in the next sequential element in the process of evolution? Whatever it is, the reality is that we are right now at the cusp of an extreme humanitarian crisis, which looks very obvious and unavoidable because of our inherent belief that faith is very much personal and it doesn’t has to be a shared value-based system bringing common good and harmony. Even though religions have taught us that faith is an altruistic philosophy, they haven’t let us practice it for one main reason: Politics.

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Religion has its prime weapon, faith that cannot just control, but wield human minds and emotions to the music of whatever that can in turn control religion, which is in our case the power to rule the masses or politics. The relationship between religion and politics is symbiotic and it must have started since faith and authority started co-existing together. Both these realms have strikingly different characteristics, yet they go hand in hand. One of them is materialistic and the other one denounces materialism in order to be selfless and magnanimous in the worldly deeds with a set of pre-defined unquestionable rules that are considered sacrosanct for thousands of years. With no avenues offered to us by the religions to experience the truly spiritual inner self, what binds us with the religion is fear that any undoing of the celestial protocols would result in damnation after death.

Authority or power politics knows its volatility very well, as a set of not-so-heavenly rules that are made on earth when insisted could unleash public anger and hence could prove fatal for the materialistic ambitions of the elite ruling class. For this reason authoritarian philosophy would love the existence of a realm that can control people out of their own free will, which in turn is a result of the fear of unknown supernatural consequences. On the other hand, the non-materialistic religious realm needed the generosity of the elite class for its sustenance and hence need to endorse whatever is dictated by the elites. Thus both of them are dependent on each other for their own good cause. When the interests of religious extremism and power politics clash, it becomes an extraneous burden on the economy in turn hurting the common masses.

This could be seen as a Faustian pact between the good and the evil, in which the good pledges its support for the prevalence of evil in return for mundane favors. This pact has proven deadly again and again as we witness the coldblooded behavior of ISIS, 969 movement and so many other such groups. Religion and power politics together put the survival of millions of lives under risk, for their own survival.